Hypermail

What is Hypermail?

One of the first integrations of the web with email, Hypermail turns standard mailing lists into published web accounts and institutional records of conversations. It has thread and link finding algorithms that can be found in most modern mail and threaded discussion systems today. It was distributed freely and widely in the early web years, and is now has an active open source community extending it. Tom designed and built the first version in Lisp in 1994; Kevin Hughes rewrote it in C and convinced our management that releasing it as open source was a good idea. It was used to publish and archive the early email discussions (such as www-talk) that shaped the creation of the WWW. Once released to the public, it took off.

Current activity

Tom hasn’t done anything to Hypermail since its first release. It has been ported to several languages, and seems to thrive in Python as part of a popular suite of open-source collaboration tools. See hypermail-project.org for current activity.

15 minutes of fame

Hypermail and Pipermail (its Python derivative) are mentioned in over 13 million pages in the Google index.